Why there will be an election this year

How's this for the ultimate present to a godchild? "I have invested Â£50 for you at 81 on an election being held this year," reads my younger daughter's card from her godfather, Mark, on this, her second birthday.

Where will Brown bounce in a 2007Â election?

Not for the first time, the bookies have taken leave of their senses. In June, I offered nine reasons for Gordon Brown go to the country immediately. I have been trying ever since to come up with a single convincing counter-argument.

Most of the factors presented as counsels for delay turn out, on closer inspection, to be precisely the opposite. An article in yesterday's Evening Standard, which listed the pros and cons of a snap poll, was typical. Among the cons were "the Brown bounce might not last," and "Brown might be exposed as a weak campaigner". Both true: and both grounds to ask for a mandate at once, before the voters realise what a neurotic, angular grumpster Labour has saddled them with.

Labour is bankrupt, the article goes on, while the Tories are rolling in it. If so, then all the more reason for Brown to act before his opponents' money begins to translate into leaflets and posters. The new PM knows that the best way to curtail the Tories' financial advantage is to ask for a dissolution: the moment he does so, statutory spending limits come into force.

Any doubts in his mind are likely to be dispelled by the line-up of Right-wing columnists urging delay.

Stephen Glover, for example, argues in today's Daily Mail that the Brown ought to play it long, chiefly because he thinks that the election would be more balanced if voters had time to weigh up both sides thoroughly rather than voting unthinkingly for the new man. Yup: but hardly a persuasive argument from the Broon's point of view.

My brilliant colleague Janet Daley chides my party for thinking that a 2007 election is even possible. "I will stake my commentator's credibility on the prediction that he will not do so, because I believe that his sense of his own political seriousness would make it inconceivable that he would cut and run before he has established his new dispensation and stamped his own objectives on government," she says.

Now Janet is what we Peruvians call "una persona muy seria": a most respectable figure.

She does not stake her credibility lightly. But she may be allowing one of her virtues her tendency to see politics in terms of high principle rather than low calculation to get the better of her. If eight years as an elected representative have taught me anything, it is that the lobby correspondent's view of the world is generally more accurate than the leader writer's. Nine times out of ten, opinion polls trump all other considerations.

Ah, you say, but none of this takes account of Gordon Brown's character. There may be all sorts of persuasive reasons for him to seek an immediate mandate, but that's not the kind of man he is. For all that he's a Fifer, he's more Macbeth than Macduff, letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would", like the poor cat i'th'adage.

Fair enough. But, even for a man ruled by cowardice, the balance must be shifting. The fear of losing an election is surely being edged aside in Brown's mind by the greater fear of being remembered as the dithering fool who, Callaghan-like, missed his chance.

Shortly after posting my "nine reasons for a 2007 election" blog, I backed my own hunch at William Hill for 111. Looking now, I see that the odds are 31. I reckon that's still a buy.Â Â Â Â Â